1. Several weeks ago my father and I were reading Horton Hears a Who to two small children of our acquaintance. I mentioned afterward that I had forgotten how political Dr. Seuss could be. He said that yes, he had been a vocal liberal.
"But surely 'a person's a person, no matter how small' is an anti-abortion message?"
He was shocked. My father is a veteran of various civil rights and anti-war campaigns in the sixties and he said that it had been obvious at the time that this was civil rights language. I said that in my experience the only people who spoke that way were pro-life activists. Segments of the pro-life movement have also appropriated the language of civil rights in some other ways.
2. Proponents of what used to be called "the New Modesty" -- Wendy Shalit and a whole bunch of Campus Crusade for Christ members, mainly -- speak of themselves pointedly as sexual revolutionaries along the lines of Brook Farm or Greenwich Village 1912. Of course they are right insofar as their values are no longer legally mandated or culturally assumed, but you will not be ostracized for wearing a promise ring,* and you cannot be put in prison for engaging in heterosexual relationships or declared an imbecile and forcibly sterilized because you restrict your childbirth to marriage.
One instance in which the analogy is not necessarily as strained: laws against the veil, which are not only religiously inflammatory, typically anti-immigrant and/or racist, and distressingly paternalistic -- but also inappropriately treat Muslim women's sexuality as the property of the public so-called, rather than their own. (Put more coarsely, "white men saving brown women from brown men.)
(Myself I am inclined to view the way fat people are treated as analogous to the way women -- especially women who are attractive and/or pregnant -- are treated: strangers assume they have a right to comment on the bodies of all these groups.)
3. Forget Protestants who consider themselves marginalized in America.** Forget white people for whom only liberals and non-whites can be racist or racially aggressive or oppressive. Turn instead to the very rich who consider themselves slandered and powerless in the public discourse. Their defenders raise the specter of the tyranny of the majority -- a good Madisonian concern in some circumstances, but not those in which we live. Yet they're perfectly sincere. Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase is sincere when he compares the "vilification" of big banks unfavorably to Lincoln's rhetoric about the Confederacy (!). The AIG people who felt like the real victims during the bonus uproar, and the people who tell the Times and the Journal that making $500,000 a year doesn't make them feel rich, and the ones who complain that Democrats just want to "punish success" and "soak the rich" are sincere. Okay, Lloyd Blankfein is being sarcastic when he says Goldman Sachs is doing God's work. But they really think that the deck is stacked against them and sometimes the little guy just can't win.
4. It is not incidental to the above cases that they involve reactionary appropriation of the language of causes that have "won." It is, however, quite incidental to them that the reactionaries in question are in the main politically conservative. For one, I am in sympathy with them on several of the issues even if I think their language choice is naive-sophisticated (sophomoric?), too clever by half, and altogether blinkered. For another, everyone is defensive, every group is defensive, when feeling under attack. The editors at Harper's try to break strikes with the fervor of a Frick, albeit without the violence. Unions run cartels, and professional licensing groups run cartels (e.g., doctors and dentists waste vast amounts of time and money by insisting on being present and getting paid for nurses' and hygienists' work), and universities are run as cartels (adjuncts being paid less to do more with no job security than tenure-track and tenured professors -- with attendant lack of status and loss of academic freedom; economists extracting higher salaries because they could make so much more money in the private sector; &c.) All of these groups use language that suggests the highest purest motivations when from the outside they seem clearly to be protecting their own and getting what they feel is their due. It's just the way things are.
Cf. this and that: we aren't intimidating, we're protecting from intimidation. People want to be in the right.
5. W.S. Gilbert finely satirized the Victorian literary convention of reversal in which the poor are valorized and the wealthy condemned by putting in the mouth of an Earl (in "Iolanthe") the following lines:
Spurn not the nobly born with love affected,
Nor treat with virtuous scorn the well-connected.
High rank involves no shame;
We boast an equal claim
With him of humble name
To be respected ...
and further
Hearts just as pure and fair
May beat in Belgrave Square
As in the lowly air of Seven Dials
-- as one might say now,
Fine morals flourish will
As much in Beacon Hill
As in the confines chill
Of Roxbury, or even Southie ...
*Although people may be weirded out if your father brags about making you wear a promise ring. That is absolutely incompatible with the New Modesty; the New Modest speak in terms of self-assertion and self-respect, not paternal ownership of daughterly genitalia.
**I suppose it doesn't seem relevant to them that Sunday is not everyone's day of rest, and no other group's holidays are recognized by the United States government, and that no one has ever been lynched in America for being a Protestant or formed a political party to protest the mass arrival of Protestant immigrants, or argued that Protestantism is not protected under the First Amendment because Protestantism isn't a religion, it's a cult, or subjected Protestant public figures to ridicule over their weird religious texts and rituals, and so on.
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